Your Business Writing

By Debbie Mayo-Smith

Who isn’t busy these days? Here are two strategies to help improve your business writing. They both help to streamline your communications for ease of reading, which will increase uptake of the content.

The first strategy is when you have a lot of paragraphs following each other, to give each paragraph it’s own subtitle in bold. Have it briefly describe the content of that paragraph. This will allow individuals to quickly absorb the essence by skimming the subtitles.

The second strategy is to use bullet points. Like a mother bird digests food for her brood, you can do the same for your readers. By reworking and bullet pointing your content –you’ll find your readers absorption will increase. Additionally, when you do bullet points, why not make a graphical statement that ties in with the message? A dentist could use toothbrushes, a doctor. a bandaid. You get my drift.

So how do you get creative? Your computer comes with fonts that have small pictures instead of letters. Examples would be Symbol, Wingdings, Holiday MT, Sports and the like

Create your bullet pointed text with the default bullets first.

If Office 2007 on the Home Ribbon, click the bullet point icon and select <define new bullet> . On prior versions of Word go to the drop down format menu, select <bullets and numbering>. When that window opens, select <customise>.

Select <font> and scroll down for your choice of picture font. Click <ok>. Next, click on <bullet> and you’ll find all the choices under that font. (At this time you can scout around for other picture fonts). Once you find the bullet point you want, you can also adjust the font size, colour, etc. Windows 2000 can even animate them now (marching red ants, Vegas lights…)